Why is America a great nation? What made it great? United States President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” has meant this question is being discussed more than ever before in recent times.

One of those joining the discussion is Robert Kaplan, a veteran foreign-policy writer with a new book titled Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World.

The United States, he writes, “is fated to lead. That is the judgment of geography as it has played out over the past two and a half centuries.”

“Geography remains an overwhelming advantage and source of American power,” he writes. “I have traveled for many weeks from east to west across the most impressive political geography in the world, or in history for that matter.”

Kaplan’s promotion of his book has brought a vital yet often overlooked truth to the world’s news media. The New York Times titled its review of the book “Geography Made America Great. Has Globalization Undone Its Influence?”

The phrase “geography made America great” is certainly worth remembering, as Mr. Trump promises to make America great again.

Stratfor, where Kaplan used to be Chief Geopolitical Analyst, has also drawn attention to this fact in an excellent essay called “The Geopolitics of the United States, Part 1: The Inevitable Empire” (emphasis added throughout):

The American geography is an impressive one. The Greater Mississippi Basin together with the Intracoastal Waterway has more kilometers of navigable internal waterways than the rest of the world combined. The American Midwest is both overlaid by this waterway and is the world’s largest contiguous piece of farmland. The U.S. Atlantic Coast possesses more major ports than the rest of the Western Hemisphere combined. Two vast oceans insulated the United States from Asian and European powers, deserts separate the United States from Mexico to the south, while lakes and forests separate the population centers in Canada from those in the United States. The United States has capital, food surpluses and physical insulation in excess of every other country in the world by an exceedingly large margin.

This geography has allowed America to live in a level of peace not known anywhere else in the world, as Stratfor explains:

Instead, the United States could exist in relative peace for its first few decades without needing to worry about any large-scale, omnipresent military or economic challenges, so it did not have to garrison a large military. Every scrap of energy the young country possessed could be spent on making itself more sustainable. When viewed together—the robust natural transport network overlaying vast tracts of excellent farmland, sharing a continent with two much smaller and weaker powers—it is inevitable that whoever controls the middle third of North America will be a great power.

Beyond just security, this geography has provided America with vast resources in food. The American Midwest “comprises both the most productive and the largest contiguous acreage of arable land on the planet,” Stratfor continues. Furthermore, America’s river system means that this food can be sold and eaten in good time, unlike Russia, where “[e]ven in modern times … crops occasionally rot before they can reach market.”

There are a lot of very intelligent people that see the massive blessing America has in its geography. However, they fail to look one step further and recognize why America has that geography.

In an article titled “What If America’s Founders Had Settled in Russia?” Trumpet contributing editor Jeremiah Jacques wrote:

If the people who inhabit this exceptional real estate were geographically guaranteed to become great, then it’s worth considering how the American people came to possess it.The Bible makes clear that God, and not men, determined the geographic locations and national borders of the Earth’s various peoples. The Apostle Paul explained in Acts 17:26 that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bound of their habitation” (see also Deuteronomy 32:8; 2 Samuel 7:10).Long before Paul explained that truth, God inspired the Old Testament patriarch Jacob to utter a landmark blessing upon his two grandsons: Ephraim and Manasseh. He placed his left hand on the head of Manasseh, the older of the two boys, and blessed him, saying he would become a great single nation (Genesis 48:14-22; 49:22-24). God fulfilled this promise to Manasseh spectacularly in the 19th and 20th centuries, when the United States of America attained towering cultural dominance, unparalleled military might, and mind-boggling economic power.But before the 20th century, before the 19th century, even long before Ephraim and Manasseh were born, God foreordained America’s greatness with geography.All the way back when He was re-creating the Earth as recorded in Genesis 1—sculpting its surface, separating dry land from sea, and carving out the continents, God was thinking of Manasseh and of His future promise to make of him the single greatest nation on Earth. Toward this end, God designated a massive and exceptional chunk of real estate for Manasseh’s descendants, the American people.Geography also motivates the U.S. government to take a more hands-off economic approach than most nations have employed. Laissez-faire capitalism has flaws, but it contributed to America becoming a bastion of freedom. A deeper look into America’s geography reveals that God set Manasseh in a position where economic and religious freedom would reign, and where His end-time work could be carried out free of the persecution that would have plagued it in most any other nation.How inspiring to consider that the Creator reserved the bulk of American land for some 5,500 years of mankind’s history, keeping it isolated and relatively unpeopled until Manasseh was ready to inhabit it and receive these astounding blessings! In a sense, God kept the land that would become America reserved for the majority of man’s history—as He waited to fulfill His promise to Manasseh. God “determined the bound” of U.S. borders, and He used geography to foreordain America’s prosperity!

This is a truth absolutely vital to remember in the age of Donald Trump. In a recent Key of David program titled “Great Again,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry said:

First of all, we have to understand that men didn’t make America great in the first place. Nor did they make Britain great, in the first place. God did that! … God is the one that should be given credit for that, and we don’t really give God credit for that today.

Only once we acknowledge this and turn back to the One that made America great in the first place, can America overcome its problems. For more on how America can, and will, be made great again, read our new, free book Great Again.